The conversation around the gender gap in the workforce often centres around two key topics – compensation and career growth. But there’s another critical facet that’s being overlooked – providing benefits that support women’s unique workplace needs.

Many organisations are committed to creating a more inclusive workplace, but the fact remains that most benefits and policies are not currently flexible enough to target specific needs of female employees. This leads to women continually hitting the glass ceiling.

An outdated benefits package won’t engage talent

While your business may promote inclusion and advancement, outdated or inflexible policies around leave, hours, care, etc. could be your downfall.

Technology has made personalisation easier than ever and it’s caused a seismic shift in how businesses develop and promote products. But, if the one size fits all approach has officially left the building for customer experience, why is it still being applied to employee benefits offerings?

HR teams and senior leadership need to be more innovative and open-minded when thinking about benefits. It is time to use a different lens and design benefits that speak to and resonate with employees.

This means providing a support system for women that allows them to focus at work. Think flexible, simple and personalized. This can range from more flexibility in work-from-home or leave policies, coverage for fertility treatments or even vibrating baby chairs for new mums to help little ones sleep better.

The good news is that this doesn’t have to translate to increased investment but rather reimagining current policies and understanding where changes can be made to your employee value proposition.

Talk directly with your employees

A thorough understanding of employees and local cultures in which your business operates is critical to creating benefits packages that resonate. Use this as an opportunity to uncover issues that employees may not be vocal about. By combining information gleaned from focus groups with data collected in anonymous employee surveys, intranet usage, manager notes, etc. you will have a better understanding of what changes need to be made.

Streamline benefits delivery

Often times, our clients offer innovative and personalized benefits but there’s a breakdown when employees go to use them due to complexity or unclear communications.

If you want to retain, attract and empower more female employees to stay onboard and grow into leadership roles, we need to do a better job tailoring benefits while still achieving business goals on diversity and inclusion.

How does your benefits package stand up when reviewing through this lens? Call us and schedule a review now.